4 Ways Social Media Helps Your Local Business During the Holidays

Making It Easy for Your Family and Friends to Help Promote Your Business During the Holidays with Social Media

How Social Media Can Help Your Local Business with ‘Word of Mouth’ Referrals During the Holidays

Many local business owners often ask how social media can help them with their business. With the holidays around the corner, this presents a great opportunity to help you grow your local business and your following in your social media communities – particularly Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn.

Consider the fact that you will be spending much of your time during Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years with family and friends and they respect and admire you as a local business owner. They also want to help you and are usually more than willing to promote your local business if you could make it easy for them. So here are some quick and easy ways you can help them help you get the word out to get more ‘Word of Mouth” referrals through social media.

First, it is important to make sure that your business is set up on the primary social media communities. The six most popular social media communities that we recommend are Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest. Having business pages on these six social media communities is important since most of your family and friends are spending time on one or more of them daily.

One of the common mistakes we often see with a local business is setting up business pages as an individual instead of a business page. Make sure yours is setup as a business page and that you, as the business owner, is setup with administrative access so that you can interact with followers on behalf of the business.

Second, make sure you connect these social communities to one another so that your comments and recommendations are shared throughout each. For instance, if you have a client, friend or family member who writes a nice post on Facebook about the work you have done, are doing or can do, you want to make sure this also reaches your Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ business pages. By connecting these social media communities, you are able to reach many more people.

Third, make sure you link your social media pages to your website in order for them to be easy to access. There are at least a couple of ways to link your website to social media communities. One is to have a ‘share’ option on your website for each major social media community where viewers can share through their own social media accounts. The second is to make sure you have your business links where they can click on the links and go directly to your social media communities to connect with you and see what your other followers are saying about you and your local business. Both of these options are great to incorporate into your website in different areas – the click to connect on your home page and the share options on your blogs is one example.

Fourth, be sure that you have captured the custom URL for your social community. This makes it easy for you to guide your family and friends to your social media links. For instance, having Facebook.com/XXIIBrands makes it much easier to have someone connect and ‘Like’ our Facebook page. Make sure you make it easy for your family, friends, employees and customers to do the same.

While there are several other ways you can use social media to promote your business during the holidays, these are inexpensive ways that really only require time and effort on your part. If you need help with any of this, you can ask about our social media packages – we would love to help. Otherwise, Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!